


KALON IN THE NILE: anecdotes from lendoch

by hey there sunshine -- (thatsquite_punwise_ofyou)



Category: Wanderlust (RP)
Genre: Blood, Character Study, Combat, Elysium, Fighting, Gen, Ocean, Other, Sail, Sailing, War, Water, maritime, maritime imagery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:07:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23997241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsquite_punwise_ofyou/pseuds/hey%20there%20sunshine%20--
Summary: Elysium is named for the heroes' afterlife. She isn't a hero, and she's far from the afterlife.In Lendoch's sand, it's difficult to make a permanent mark. Somehow, though, Lys manages.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 2





	1. NEPHENTHYS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elysium is a sailor, and she can't stand calm seas.

The rolling waves purr under the boat’s smiling planks. It is manned by a single sailor clad in simple, but elegant garb. She watches the sky and the sun and the waves, diligent and unwavering. Usually, she’d have a small crew attending her boat like a fleet of the soldiers this sailor spent most of her time training. Today, though, Elysium had gone alone.

As she tugs a rope and ties a few knots, Elysium recalls a story her mother often retold when she was shaking and coughing, and Lys was the only visitor.

Elysium hears her mother’s voice on the wind, in the salt-infused air. She supposes it must’ve been like this when she was born; rocking, uneven, the air itself turning to water. Her mother told her she was born at sea. Her parents had been on their way home from a voyage to Lendoch’s jungled regions. Lys never has been one for patience, which might explain her premature delivery.

Her mother is Nephthys Anurai. Their bloodline was once a strong one, Lys has been told, but she hardly sees it in either of her parents.

She sees the shadow of a once fine man in her father, but the man he is now could hardly be called a man by Elysium’s standards. If she had no obligation to respect him as one of Lendoch’s monarchs and as her father, Lys has no doubt that he would be the sort Lys would crush underfoot in a heartbeat.

Her mother is a different case. Elysium looks out at the water and wonders if this is how her mother feels all the time: unbalanced, always in motion, the threat of capsize present in every moment. Her mother is a pitiful figure, and has been since Elysium was a toddler.

Elysium will not be weak like her parents.

She pulls herself away from the brink of drowning in her thoughts; thoughts and trips down memory lane rarely serve a purpose anyway. Elysium is on a boat, and it is not going to sail itself.

With expert hands practised in this methodical maritime art, Elysium crafts a few knots to hold the boat’s sail steady. Her hands are calloused with years of performing these labours. When she was a child and first learning how to sail, her hands would be marked with rope burns and sometimes bleeding.

Elysium doesn’t bleed anymore.

She stands at the helm of her vessel, attentive to every change in the wind, every shift in the current. Elysium cannot afford anything less than vigilance. It is not difficult for her, though; her attentiveness is almost inattentive in how accustomed she is to these habits.

Elysium stands firm with crossed arms and planted feet for ten minutes. Then her legs get sore. Her feet hurt. She’s finding it difficult to maintain balance. Even worse, the sea is going still and silent. Some sailors would shake with fear at a typhoon, but absolute tranquility unnerved Elysium more than any storm could. She holds her stance, unswayed by her own discomfort.

When there was no wind to propel the boat, how would it move? When there was no current to follow, how could there be any shift? Any motion? Elysium could always resort to rowing, but the ship in her use is intended for a small crew and it would be more tedious to attempt this than it would be to wait for the wind to pick up again.

Elysium does not like waiting. She can handle maintaining the same position, no matter how uncomfortable, for up to hours on end. She can face a horde of enemies and emerge victorious. She can defeat every contestant in the coliseum if she so chooses. But waiting is an effort of an entirely different brand.

The sea is silent and still, and Lys is getting frustrated. She paces her ship, and occasionally stops when she thinks she feels a little breeze or a shift in the water she is so attuned to despite the materials between her feet and the depths.

But there is no movement in the air nor in the water.

Elysium is stuck until she learns patience.

A half hour passes. Then another. There is no change in the air. It crosses Elysium’s mind that she might have died. She has always imagined an afterlife like this: endless waves and creaking wood. A flapping sail and the taste of the ocean on the air-

Wait. Flapping sail? Elysium dismisses the notion of death; dying at sea would be peaceful, and peaceful is not a word Elysium is particularly fond of. Her death will be glorious and in the heat of battle, blazing like the sun in the desert- not calmly rocking away to endless sleep in the ocean’s cradle.

The sail is moving, and Elysium has to act quickly or lose this opportunity and endure more dreaded patience. The secure knots she had choked the boat with obligingly loosened under their sailor’s hand. She adjusts them and they are secure again, reborn in the seaspray.

Seaspray! Another welcome sign of motion, and a welcome reprieve from the sun. It is always easy to forget that the sun is just as scorching on the ocean as it is in the desert; it usually takes one of these mists from the water to remind Lys that she is not immune to the solar power bearing down on her skin. She adjusts her clothing to better shadow her face; a sunburn is never a pleasant experience.

Having triumphed over the trial of patience, Elysium guides her ship toward the shore. She cannot see it, but she does not need to. Elysium mastered navigation with the rest of sailing’s nuances.

She arrives at the shore and feels a familiar rush. It is the same feeling that permeates her being whenever she finishes a battle. It is triumph. It is victory.

At the shore, she is greeted by a familiar face- or rather, lack thereof; Dekari keeps his face masked, usually. Aside from his eyes, anyway. Elysium only recalls seeing his full expression a few times since he had been appointed guard to herself and Aspen, her future ruling partner.

“Elysium,” Dekari calls, “you know you shouldn’t sail on your own.” He is stoic and unreadable, as always. Elysium is one of the few who can say she knows him well, but she knows him as well as a captain might know his steering wheel; it is familiar, but he does not take the time to count each of its pegs or familiarise himself with every piece of wood.

“And what do you propose to stop me, Kari?” Elysium calls back. She is tying her vessel to a dock reserved specifically for Lys’ ships. “Just because you beat me in one match doesn’t mean you can do it again, you know.” There is a trace of humour in her tone, but Elysium means it; she is as difficult to overcome as a tsunami curling over a raft.

Dekari does not reply, instead choosing silence. He watches her finish anchoring her ship to the dock, then waits for Elysium to walk over and accompany him up a path where they will walk until they find the sand dunes.

Sand surfing is not so different from its water-bound cousin. Elysium sometimes wishes Lendoch’s capital was closer to the ocean and not in the desert. But sand surfing alleviates her longing, a little bit.

Elysium and Dekari reach the point where the terrain becomes a desert. Dekari offers Elysium a board, for she had neglected to remember to retrieve hers from the boat. She takes it with a grateful grunt, and a moment later, the pair tear down the dunes, propelled by the sand itself.

The sand drifting through the air, levitating with the wind’s help, is usually harmless. But at the velocity Kari and Lys travel at, the sand is deadly. It reminds Elysium of the seaspray, but instead of bringing a little relief from the sun’s rays, it stings and irritates. She enforces her abilities over the sand itself, forcing it to part for her, like an invisible shield around her person.

They travel like this for around a half hour. Unlike the half hours spent waiting around on her boat, Elysium is not bored; sand surfing is, at its core, motion. And motion is vitalising. It is the opposite of that infernal punishment of waiting for something else to act upon her vessel. The only thing taking action in sand surfing is the surfer- Elysium, in this case.

After this half hour, the last oasis comes into view: Lendoch’s capital.

Their surfing slows as Dekari and Elysium draw near. The sand bending to their wills die down until there is no more motion. Elysium crouches to unearth her board, which she then hefts under one arm. She leads the way to a path that winds down to the city like a dry river.

They come to the palace. Elysium begins to stride to the barracks to check in on the soldiers under her training, but Dekari puts a hand on her shoulder.

“Your mother,” he explains. He doesn’t need to say anything else. Elysium sighs out her disappointment and tastes a little bit of salt, perhaps leftover from seaspray that she had inhaled on the water.

Lys doffs the extra clothing she’d had on as protection from the sun, leaving most of her skin bared to the cool air characteristic of desert shadows.

She knocks on her mother’s door. Elysium’s parents have not shared a room for years; Nephthys cannot handle the amount of activity that came with another person in her living space.

“Ely, my sun, is that you?” her mother’s weak voice coughs out. Swallowing her frustration, Elysium walks in and shuts the door.

She wishes her mother could be more like Queen Neith, Aspen’s mother. Elysium wishes her mother could be a role model. Someone other than the wizened mummy she is now.

“Yes, Mother,” Elysium says anyway, careful to keep her voice gentle. She does not know if the feelings she harbours for her mother could be called love. Does a pier love the boats it houses? Does a ship love the crew that tends to it?

“Come here.” Lys obliges after a moment’s reluctance, and crouches at her mother’s bedside.

Elysium stiffens, startled; a tender hand traces her face.

“Have you been at sea, my sun?” Nephthys asks, and retracts her hand as if she senses Lys’ stiffness.

“Yes, Mother,” Elysium says again, patience thinning. How long must she endure this slow conversation? It is slower than the tortoises she has witnessed at certain ceremonies.

“Did you know I was once a sailor?” Nephthys’ eyes are empty. Elysium contains her revulsion aimed at this old woman with no strength in her being.

“Yes, Mother,” comes the same reply.

Nephthys’ eyes close. “When I die, will you make sure they rest my body in the sea?”

The question takes Elysium off-guard, and she frowns before repeating the same two words she had spouted throughout this tedious conversation.

Nephthys nods. Or maybe she is merely adjusting her position a little. “Good, good…”

Elysium stands, sensing her meeting with her mother is coming to a conclusion. Nephthys’ lips twist a little, like she wants to protest her daughter’s sailing away.

But before she can, Elysium is out the door with only words like a shortsword as a farewell.

“I have duties to attend to, Mother. Please get some rest.”

Nephthys nods again, heart sinking like a body in the sand. She hears the door close, and her sun is gone.


	2. SEKHMET

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life is blood, and blood coats life. Elysium knows this. It is a lesson she teaches her opponents.

Life is blood. It is the thick warmth coating your enemies’ bodies. It is the iron tang in your mouth that you spit into the dust on the ground at your opponent’s feet. It is power coursing through your veins and surging adrenaline.

Life is war and pain and the glory of battle.

Elysium’s name conjured to mind a blissful peace, island paradises and endless sunsets.

Elysium’s nature couldn’t be farther from this image.

She was a princess, but her future subjects knew her as General Anurai. Elysium’s days were spent teaching young soldiers how to draw blood, life itself, from their adversaries. Her nights were spent tending to their injuries – ones that often had been inflicted by her, in fact – and whetting her weapons.

When she felt that Lendoch was in need of a reminder of her power (power she had obtained herself; no one could say Elysium ducked in the shadow of her heritage), she would enter the old coliseum and rip apart her foes there, a public display of Lendoch’s might.

Elysium was born in a typhoon, and she lived in a storm of fighting.

The wind she was so accustomed to roared in her face, now, reminding her that she did not belong on the ground. Elysium stood. She heard the raucous audience shouting. Were they supporting her or jeering at their princess, who had been taken off her feet in this duel?

Elysium blinked the sun and sand out of her eyes, and her fingers found her sword. Elysium was on the ground one second, and on her feet the next. She faced her opponent; a strange man with a mask covering half his face.

Some people compared a fight as intense as this – blades screaming and gritting every time they met; they’d struggle for a few seconds before their wielders jumped back to reorganize – to a dance. Elysium could never call a fight a dance. A dance was frilly and many of the movements unnecessary. A fight was a rugged battle for survival. There was nothing beautiful or frilly or elegant about something so brutal.

Combat was about delivering powerful attacks with minimal cost to the attacker, and maximum cost to the defender. Elysium charged her opponent with light feet ready to change tactics at a moment’s notice. The masked man stood his ground and waited for her approach.

Their blades met again and struggled against each other. Elysium kept pressing, though; in previous standoffs like this, they had both backed off when it looked too grim. Elysium was not backing off this time. Not for real, anyway; she feinted a retreat, but as soon as her opponent let his sword begin to drop, she sliced hers back down.

Blood stained his clothing. Nothing serious, but certainly enough to make a scene. And making a scene was paramount in an arena battle in the coliseum.

Elysium lifted her head to the roaring audience. Their cries were definitely approving ones, this time. Lys’ attention drifted to the battlemaster sitting above. It was her decision whether Lys could kill or spare her opponent, now that he was prone and in her mercy.

Elysium typically was not one for concepts of honour. But battle honour was a different matter; her opponent had fought well. Exceptionally well, even. In fact, he rather reminded her of her guard, Dekari, the only person who’d beaten Elysium in a fair sword fight in recent years. She did not think that her foe under her weight would be given permission to die.

The crowd cheered. They cheered for life. They cheered for blood. They cheered for death.

The battlemaster proffered her arm to the crowd. Her thumb turned down.

Elysium’s next actions came swiftly. She identified an exploitable chink in the man’s breast armour. She thrust her sword into the masked man’s chest. She left it there for a moment and registered the crowd’s applause. Elysium pulled her sword out of the dead man’s body, and left the arena.

Blood coated her sword. Someone gave her a towel. She used it to clean the blood, leaving her blade shining brighter than ever, as if invigorated by the infusion of iron from the blood.

It made sense. Blood was life.


End file.
